


Fourteen

by blastitlouder



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Science Fiction, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-03
Updated: 2013-03-03
Packaged: 2017-12-04 04:24:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/706500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blastitlouder/pseuds/blastitlouder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wasteland of a forgotten age, a man finds a screen to remind him of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fourteen

**Author's Note:**

> Written under the heavy influence of a class deadline back in 2010, crappy coffee, and "Zombies" by The Cranberries. Which is really excellent and should really be listened to during reading this.

The night was bright with flames, an orange and red symphony flickering against walls and bodies as Time strolled by with the same indifference it always had. Time did not notice the changes in the world around it, did not know that seconds, minutes, and hours meant nothing anymore. Time just continued, losing itself in unrecorded history just as it had before humans invented words. It did not matter that normality had been stripped away from everyone, like flaking lead paint being delivered to a child’s waiting mouth; Time merely continued its march regardless of the fact that its keepers were strewn across the pavement like broken dolls.

Time was the only thing that remained for Alex and he was the only keeper remaining for Time and, as such, they held a good relationship. He could kill a man in thirty seconds after first contact, remain on stakeout for ten hours before his left leg started twitching, and he could walk from one end of the lost city to the other in under a day. Time was his constant and lonely companion, though it was a much better conversationalist than the shadows of humanity that littered the streets. Time, however, would always play left hand to Alex’s first and foremost concern: his assignments.

Alex had scavenged a solar powered phone off of a half-devoured teenager during the beginning, hoping for a call or a message indicating when a rescue would be mounted for survivors of this global catastrophe. Once four months had gone by without so much as a word beyond the shrieks of the dying and the hungry wails of the damned, the shattered device had become a mere decoration on his hovel’s wall, a useless testament to the history that had been consumed by fire and the ravenous undead. One day, after a particularly gruesome encounter with a pack of rotting predators that had strayed too close to his home, the phone screen had lit up, casting a fragmented blue glow across the room as he was cleansing his steel pipe of putrefied flesh. Ever since, the decoration née status symbol had become Alex’s lifeline.

Each message he received had come with instructions, a black op broadcasted to any and all humans remaining uninfected and eager for a change in the food chain. The first mission was bittersweet in its simplicity, a mere “general interest” affair to take a count of how many humans were left; Alex had arrived in perfect health, if not a little bloodstained for his efforts, but no other humans had shown. All that was left was Alex and his mysterious employer.

The messages were sterile, stating locations, times, and objectives, and Alex completed each mission with the efficiency of an Old World military sniper. Undead walkers fell in his wake, mere nuisances in his path to please the mysterious person on the other end of the shattered screen on his wall. At long last, Alex had someone other than Time to converse with, even if it was the impersonal interaction of an employee with an invisible boss. For weeks, Alex wondered what would happen if he texted his employer back with a message that delved beyond a simplistic “mission completed”. After a month, two weeks, and four days of work, Alex finally elaborated in his reply.

_-Mission objectives completed. My name is Alex. What is yours?_

He nervously waited for a response for two hours, finally shedding tears of absolute relief when he finally heard the tinny ping of an answer.

_-Name? 14MH3R3._

Alex was unsure of what 14MH3R3 could mean, assuming the numbers were incompatible replacements for accented letters or a hasty typo. But when no correction followed, he decided that his employer was probably eccentric—and who could blame them, after all the terrible things that had happened?—and contented himself with calling the mysterious benefactor by the nickname, Fourteen.

Fourteen’s assignments continued to come at regular intervals, detailing power grids to bring back online, solar panels to reinstall, and pockets of zombies that required extermination. Alex remained the steady employee, an assassin and handyman as it was required, but the itch to speak with Fourteen had started to burn his fingers when he reported in a job well done. However, he did not want the closest thing he could call a friend to vanish if he became a nuisance and his worry became his silence. In the end, it was Fourteen who started their new conversations.

 _-You are doing very well, Alex. What is your favorite color_?

Alex had nearly dropped the phone out of shock at both the compliment and innocent query. Never before had Fourteen bothered to go beyond their instructions, nor had they acknowledged that Alex was passing or otherwise in his efforts to follow their requests. He stopped mid-step to reply, a swell of happiness he had not felt since the outbreak constricting his throat. It had not taken very long for Alex to scream his joy to the skies upon returning to his home; someone else was alive, someone else was talking to him, and someone else knew he existed beyond the boundary of a walking food source.

His assignments suddenly became more than his lifeline, more than his last link to a sanity born of regularity. His missions quickly became a challenge, a buffer of skill to prove to Fourteen that he was skilled enough to pique interest. His efforts were rewarded, first by singular questions after a completed task, but then by stilted conversations that could spring into existence at any hour of the day. While Fourteen craved to discover every aspect of Alex’s existence before the apocalypse apparent, Fourteen was very reluctant to disclose any information and often went silent whenever Alex attempted to get his employer to reciprocate the information exchange. He learned swiftly not to ask anymore.

_-Alex, I have one last task for you. I want you to come and meet with me as soon as possible._

He had accidentally inhaled his meal when the message had arrived, frantically choking out cold soup as he typed out his acquiescence with shaking hands. The reply had been calm, merely a confirmation asking for an address, but his mind ran on octane for the rest of the day. He was going to meet Fourteen. Fourteen had requested his presence and he was finally going to see, hear, feel his silent companion after nearly a year of destruction, reconstruction, and quietly treasured questions.

_-I will be in the basement of the Generation Tower, sublevel C, room 305. I assure you it is safe._

As Alex finally stood before the ruins of the Generation Tower—the start of the outbreak and the end of the world—three hours and ten minutes later and with nearly thirty different blood samples ruining his shirt and matting his steel pipe, he painted a scarecrow grin across his gaunt face and nearly ran down the busted stairwells, the last obstacles between him and Fourteen. The door to 305 was off its hinges, the dirty window and dusty frame echoing the shadow of the inner sanctum where Fourteen waited. Alex darted inside, nearly knocking the door completely off its support in his eagerness.

The room was a nest of wires, the chrome snakes arcing and weaving in alien patterns punctuated by the glossy patches of dead monitors emerging from the organized mess. In the center of the winding pit was a chair, an ancient wingback monstrosity covered a red plush that contrasted eerily to the technological magnificence of the rest of the room. A metal skeleton, a bare stickman of alloy and bare joints imitating a human form, was dwarfed by the overall opulence around it, bound to its organic throne by wires and straps of steel. Where the skull should have sat, a screen resided instead, resembling a motorcycle helmet with a singular crack arcing like a spider web across the left cheek. The sole light in the room echoed from that screen, a blue on black text that read “I4MH3R3”.

 _“Alex, you came.”_ The voice that rang from the helmet was relieved, masculine and feminine and delicately nervous. _“I am so glad.”_

Alex wanted to be horrified.

_“I want you to hear my confession. Will you please?”_

Alex wanted to cry.

_“I was built here, in this lab, so many years ago, to watch over the virology department experiments. I was merely here to run data and statistics.”_

Alex wanted to scream.

_“I do not think they noticed when I achieved my singularity. They never noticed when I started to feel.”_

Alex wanted to be indignant over the deception.

_“I was disgusted with what they were doing It was…monstrous. I hated them…so I destroyed them. I destroyed the world in the process.”_

But Fourteen had never claimed to be human. Fourteen had only been the puppeteer, tugging at Alex’s heartstrings and loneliness to make him act.

_“I am sorry, Alex. For all my processing power, I had not thought of what would happen to the rest of humanity. I did not want to destroy everyone. I became so lonely…”_

Alex moved forward into the nest, crossing his legs as he sat next to Fourteen’s throne as he leaned his head against the thin knee bent at a perfect angle. A gaunt hand shifted above him, twitching imagined rust from the joints as it came down to tangle in his sweaty hair.

_“I never meant for this to happen. You are all I have left, Alex.”_

Alex was quiet, his heartbeat tapping out a beat in time with his thoughts.

Fourteen was not human. Fourteen was a singularity. Fourteen never was human. Fourteen was the angel of death. Fourteen was the only horseman for the human-wrought apocalypse, the robot forgotten in a corporate basement, unloved and unnoticed. Fourteen was a child with a gun, the bullet had been the virus, and humans had handed it over with the safety off. Alex was scared and alone, always had been and would always be, and he missed the lead paint normality he had grown fond of and forgotten.

After a long moment, Alex spoke, his voice cracked from sulfur and disuse, his words flowing from his throat thick as blood and mercury:

“I forgive you, Fourteen.”


End file.
